Arranging Marriage

Arranged marriage is an intrinsic part of India’s culture. Families choose their children’s spouse for them, matching compatibility criteria with horoscopes and family status. For the family of the groom, how much dowry the bride brings tops the list of priorities. The more educated the groom, the bigger the dowry demand. Doctors and engineers, and grooms living in America with their increased earning power, are costly commodities.

Most westerners cannot conceive the idea of their parents choosing their marriage partner for them. Making a lifelong commitment with someone that they do not know. But in India, the general thinking is, who better to do the choosing then one’s parents, the ones who know you the best? Loveless nuptials is not considered, love is said to grow after marriage. Love marriages are often felt to be frivolous and fleeting, so are still relatively rare in India, though there are couples that are defying the system and following their heart instead of tradition.

The first time I went to India, in 2000, strangers would come and ask me where I was from, immediately followed by the statement, “Oh, America, where half of all of your marriages end in divorce.” They seemed to derive great satisfaction in highlighting our marriage failures.

While the divorce rate is stirring in India today, many still don’t dare speak of it even if the love after marriage never materialized. Being coerced into the partnership does not offer the freedom to simply leave an abusive or unsatisfying marriage.

Marriage is a monumental step in life, one that asks that we, with certainty, are committed to devote our life to another person in a ‘day in, day out’, existence. The recommended period of engagement that allows for a slow cultivation offers no guarantee. Many marriages topple under the pressure of expectation, unfulfilled promises, and the faces that emerge after the ‘I do’s’ are said.

It’s in this knowledge that some feel arranged marriages may offer something more substantial than love marriages. While there can be merit in an arranged marriage – some of them work out famously – the issue is one of choice. The freedom to choose, firstly, if one wants to marry, and if so, whom they want to marry.

In a February 2006 issue of National Geographic on the topic of Love, Renu Dinakaran – who thinks that many arranged marriages are acts of “state sanctioned rape” – was interviewed for a segment of the story. She tells how, at the age of 17, she was forced to marry her cousin. She says that she wanted to learn to love her husband, but the more years that passed, the less love she felt for him. It was the movie “Love Story” that convinced Renu that there was more to marriage. This knowing gave rise to bitterness, but it also helped her to move out of a loveless marriage, a courageous step for an Indian wife with two children. Liberating herself of that arrangement allowed love in when she met Anil, who she is happily married to today.